Rouge 1.48 title screen

A while back while looking for old Rogue source, and resources I came across this page, which includes a lot of old versions, and source code, and the file rog11src.zip. But looking at the source in this directory the file rogue.h reveals that it is actually 1.48!

#define REV 1
#define VER 48

And the source is all timestamped from late 1984, and throughout 1985.  Well, isn’t that exciting!  Also on the same site is rogue-1.48.zip, a binary distribution of Rogue 1.48.  So I thought I’d give it a shot to build it.  The source mentions needing the MANX C compiler, which of course a quick google search yields an ad:

Manx Aztec C86

Which has all kinds of fascinating information, such as the ability to cross compile from VAX BSD, or PDP-11 BSD, the Amiga, CP/M etc but they don’t actually give any information about versions.

There is, however, an Aztec C museum, that hosts several versions.   And they do have the versions, along with the years to show that the C86 compiler that they had for 1985 would be 3.4b

Version 3.4b
Compiler Aztec C 8086 3.40a 7-3-86
(C) 1982,83,84,85 by Manx Software Systems, Inc.

And conveniently, they do have a download link for the comiler here: az8634b.zip

Now, since I’m on Windows 10 x64 I can’t easily run MS-DOS based compilers from 1985 at my native CLI, without a tool, and I chose Takeda Toshiya’s MSDOS.  I was able to ‘bind’ the azmake utility which then could call the needed compiler, assembler, and linker to build an executable without too much work.  I just created a command file, ‘build.cmd’ in the src directory, to setup the paths and needed variables to quickly compile Rogue from the command line.  And a quick attempt at playing it showed that although it does compile, it is unplayable!

Killed by the Copy Protection Mafia

Well, isn’t that great.  There is a copy protection scheme.  But wait, we have source so can’t we just bypass it?  Yes we can!  In the file dos.asm there is some checks for the variables hit_mul & goodchk.  So I did the logical thing, which is before it checks them, I just set them to good values.

; fake copy protection
mov hit_mul_, 1
mov goodchk_, 0D0DH

And the good news is that I would no longer get killed by the Mafia, but I couldn’t progress down any levels.  So in the file oprotec.asm, I saw there is some disk check routine called protect, that I went ahead and bypassed by having it immediately jump down to the ‘good’ label. Everything compiles but it still locks up going down a level.  So finally I check rogue.h and commend the #define PROTECT statement, and now it’ll run!

I don’t know if anyone would even care, but I added the PDF manual and all the zip files that I used to source this version.  You can download it here:

rogue-148_binary+source.7z

If you don’t want to run it under MS-DOS, or something like DOSBox, you can use MS-DOS to run it.  The title screen is garbled as it doesn’t emulate CGA, but as the rest is just text mode, it’ll run just fine.

Now I’ve tried to compile it on contemporary UNIX of the time, namely Unix v7, 2.9 BSD and 2.10 BSD and they fail at the same point:

hack.monst.c:99: Too many initializers: mon
*** Error code 1

Stop.

What is more weird is I didn’t see anyone having any reports of it working, just requests for the code.  Although I have been able to compile and run it on 4.2BSD/VAX.  So it must be a cc/pcc thing, or some other C compiler they are using on the PDP-11 in Amsterdam circa 1985.  And then I found this interesting bit:

Date-Received: Mon, 22-Apr-85 06:57:56 EST
References: <556@intelca.UUCP>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Distribution: net
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 11

In article <556@intelca.UUCP> cem@intelca.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes:
>… about the PDP-11 version of hack …
>All in all it doesn’t seem to do 90% of the things that make it different
>from rogue.

The PDP-11 version of hack is a slightly improved (by people at the VU,
Amsterdam) version of some code that was stolen from my directory
some three years ago; it was being worked on, and certainly not in a
shape fit for distribution. Thus, as you noted, it doesnt have half
of the features present in hack, and, what is worse, it is very buggy.
I am sorry it was distributed.

Which to me is kind of interesting as this recently happened on September 21st:

The NetHack Development Team feels it is necessary to publicly address an issue that has surfaced in the last week.

Recently a NetHack source distribution has appeared, claiming to be NetHack 3.5 or 3.5.0 or 3.4.4.

This claim is partially correct. This is our code. However it was not released by us or with our authorization. This code is not ready for release: it is unfinished, unpolished, and almost certainly very buggy. It has not been play-tested for balance or functionality. It is best considered a partial and unfinished rough draft. We will not be supporting this code, nor will we be releasing binaries or bugfixes for it. It will not be available through our website.

Due to this incident and to prevent confusion, we will not now nor in the future release anything with a version number of 3.4.4, 3.5, or 3.5.0.

We thank those of you who play and develop both NetHack and its many variants for your support and encouragement at this time and over the many years NetHack and its progeny have and continue to evolve.

So yeah it seems there is a long history of hacking hack, why even the Fortran port of Zork was born that way:

Zork (was) only as encrypted files that were runnable in an MDL environment but were not readable (and modifiable) as source code. They even went so far as to patch their famously insecure ITS development system, adding security to just the directory that stored the source. Hackers, however, wonâ€t be denied, and soon one from DEC itself had penetrated the veil. From Infocomâ€s own official “History of Zork“:

[The security] was finally beaten by a system hacker from Digital: using some archaic ITS documentation (thereâ€s never been any other kind), he was able to figure out how to modify the running operating system. Being clever, he was also able to figure out how our patch to protect the source directory worked. Then it was just a matter of decrypting the sources, but that was soon reduced to figuring out the key weâ€d used. Ted had no trouble getting machine time; he just found a new TOPS-20 machine that was undergoing final testing, and started a program that tried every key until it got something that looked like text. After less than a day of crunching, he had a readable copy of the source. We had to concede that anyone whoâ€d go to that much trouble deserved it. This led to some other things later on.

Indeed,hackers won’t be denied.

From: play@mcvax.UUCP (funhouse)
Newsgroups: net.games,net.sources
Subject: Hack sources posted
Message-ID: <6238@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Dec-84 09:11:48 EST
Article-I.D.: mcvax.6238
Posted: Mon Dec 17 09:11:48 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Dec-84 07:04:44 EST
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 20
Xref: watmath net.games:1303 net.sources:2185

I will post the sources for Hack to net.sources.
They come in 10 parts; the total source is slightly over 400kbyte.

Hack is a game resembling rogue (but much richer than the versions
of rogue I have had access to).

The game runs on all machines with sufficient address space:
$ ls -l /usr/games/HACK
-rws--x--x  1 play       159744 Nov 10 19:09 /usr/games/HACK
$ size /usr/games/HACK
text	data	bss	dec	hex
106496	34816	29264	170576	29a50
but if you are unfortunate enough to have a backward C compiler
(without structure assignments or bitfields or functions returning
structures or with only 6 significant chars to an identifier)
then you'll have to work to get this running.

I am happy with mail, but will be abroad the next four weeks.

Good Luck & Happy Hacking !

Oddly enough the full source code to Hack had been lost.  Even the Nethack Wiki didn’t have the full source code, although thanks to the UTZOO archives by Henry Spencer, I was able to look through enough of the tapes since I had the date and subject in hand, and I was able to pull out the entire thing.

hack 1.0 preliminary version

I’ve added a package tape for SIMH, as it builds and runs on 4.2 BSD out of the box.

It’s really cool to have saved this from the digital dumpster, although it was there all along.  And thanks to others for at least pointing out that part of it was missing or I’d never even look.

Hack

I figured that since I could build hack for some ancient 4BSD flavors that I should be able to build hack for good old fashioned Xenix.

And it all seems to work as it should!

I used the source from here, and only had to do a few small modifications to get it to compile and run on Xenix via GCC 1.37.1 .

You can download my binary, and source mods.

I’ve managed to keep this instance of Xenix up for 19 hours, I was thinking about doing some kind of public access to this system, but I don’t know if people would even be vaguely interested..

But if you want access, I can set you up.

Although all that is of interest is ‘dungeon’, fortune, hack, robots, and ircII …

Thanks to some people in Russia, and Google translate, I found some explicit instructions on building Nethack…

Which spelt out that you need Visual C++ 6.0 to create the dependancies, then use embedded Visual C++ 3.0 to build, which the snag there, is that I was foolishly using 4.0 service packed to level 4, which stripped out support for the SH4 cpu…!

Thankfully, the site hpcfactor, maintains a download for embedded VC 3.0, and I was able to churn out an exe for the emulator. Then tearing it appart, I was able to replicate the build using Platform Builder 2.11 to create a native x86 executable.

So after all that work, here it is!

NetHack for WindowsCE x86

For those people on x86 machines, or using the CEPC platform, here is the exe, datafile, and finally the source code.

This is what I’m hoping I can manipulate for SIMH…

Nethack on CE text

Textmode in graphics…

It’s great when old software just doesn’t revive for a little while then fade back to obscurity, so update your links, or just browse the site and be blown away by all their information on such a great (and difficult) game.

And of course, I have NetHack for the Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, and various 4.X BSD on sourceforge under the package tapes….

The build was a little weird as itâ€s expecting the first compiler tools that shipped with the Win32 SDK “Final release” for Windows NT 3.1  While it may have been ‘easier†to just install the old SDK, you can just copy cl.exe to mcl.exe & make a dummy ntdll.lib ….

Anyways with a little poking around I got it to build & run!  Itâ€s cool!  Although to be honest I SUCK at nethack.

You can download it here.  Itâ€s lovingly hard coded to use c:\games\nethack … Iâ€m sorry about that, as Iâ€ve given up on having C/D/E drives like a ‘secure†MIPS machine, and just have a giant (haha!) 2GB system partition.

nethack MIPS

Itâ€s also worth noting that itâ€s easier to try to build stuff on a ‘native†machine running MSVC 2.0/2.1 then copy the stuff over the the MIPS simulator as it is SLOW.  But then that is to be expected.. Itâ€s too bad the Qemu MIPS simulator cannot idle… as it runs one of my cores @ 100%.

Here is a quick log:

myname# make
cc -g -c hack.Decl.c
cc -g -c hack.apply.c
cc -g -c hack.bones.c
cc -g -c hack.c
hack.c: 799: missing endif
*** Error code 1

Stop.
myname# gcc -g -c hack.c
myname# make
cc -g -c hack.cmd.c

…

cc -g -c rnd.c
cc -g -c alloc.c
Loading …
myname# size hack
text data bss dec hex
158720 47104 30404 236228 39ac4
myname# ls -l hack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root 694272 May 10 10:23 hack
myname# strip hack
myname# ls -l hack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root 206848 May 10 10:23 hack

And with that being said, it seems just about any version of GCC will do… from 1.27 to 2.45. I’ve test played it, and you get the tombstone when you die, not a core dump. This applies to 4.2 BSD and all the 4.3 BSD’s. I’ve updated the sourceforge binary packages that I have made for Hack to include this hybrid exe that seems to work just fine.

Happy hacking!